Networking services have become increasingly important in today's society. One feature of networking services relates to client or source awareness. Certain services, functions, or capabilities may be provided to a group of end users or to clients based on a corresponding source profile or policy. Devices or components within a network must generally be able to identify such a profile or policy before offering selected enhanced services, functions, or capabilities to a targeted group of end users. Accordingly, sufficient information must be made available at specific times in order to allow for an accurate identification of a flow and, further, to bill for and/or process that flow accordingly.
As the subscriber base of end users increases and/or becomes mobile, proper routing and efficient management of communication sessions and data flows becomes even more critical. In some environments, policy, locale, or service level may be unknown, inaccurate, or ambiguous at various times during a communication session. This deficiency may create synchronization issues where an end user may be incorrectly billed or where other users may have access to certain information that should not be made available to them or where other users are inadvertently susceptible to hacking. Thus, the ability to properly manage policy information in a network environment, while achieving optimal policy synchronization amongst network components, whilst maintaining charging accuracy presents a significant challenge to system designers, component manufacturers, and network operators.